Michael Arrington: “Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.”
I beg to differ. Finding the balance between your ideas of what users ought to want, data-driven research about results and usage, and subjective user feedback is what makes you a winner. Too much dedication to any one will lead to failure.
It’s not fair to judge the level of national discourse by blog or newspaper comments. I know this.
And yet I can’t help but make broad generalizations when something that is basically a complaint about cliche and exaggeration in political writing draws a comment like this:
I got it I find I queation my own mind the Obama in office I see him trying to bankrupt the country I see him wanting to put our kids education camps It not just financial its every thing My family just loves him I tryed but I cant I hope I am nuts because our country seem be in deep shit.Free trade worked all this long I hate this new world order They will have to drag me I think he is a communist.
Megan’s friend John knows a guy whose parents have a farm west of town with a few head of cattle. They’re pastured, grass-fed, not pumped up on anabolics, generally not drugged unless they need it. Uncertified organic, if you will. Every year, John and a few of his friends pool their money and buy one of them, and split it five or six ways – they butcher it locally . If you’ve got a deep freezer it’s a serious bargain.
Of course, delivery is a little tricky. John’s schedule didn’t match up with ours, so he gave our share to his friend Giovanni who lives in Newton, and we planned to go by his place and get it, but put it off til the next weekend, and then the next, and the next.
And then Giovanni got laid off. I guess he’s on an H1B visa, because he’s now moving back to Italy with his family, and selling his appliances on Craigslist. He had an offer on the freezer, so I had to go get the meat right away. Midweek rush-hour driving in Boston isn’t exactly my idea of a great way to spend a Wednesday evening, and of course I got totally lost (I’ve learned Somerville’s little warrens of one-ways and missing street signs, but Newton?), but now I have seventy-some-odd pounds of grass-fed local protein.
And a sore back from carrying it.
And a sinking feeling about the global economy.
The big question is: Euro or Dollar?
I keep thinking of signing up for a class at Harvard Extension or wherever, maybe in economics or statistics – subjects I sort of wish I’d learned more about in school. But you know, I just don’t want to deal with the homework. I think I’ll go for Academic Earth and Wikibooks.
Oh, right. Planet Murdoch. It’s been five weeks! How come he hasn’t fixed the economy yet? Maybe because you can’t fix in five weeks what nearly a decade of your abuse has wrought?
Message to the denizens of the WSJ editorial page: You had your turn. You were proven to be lying, cheating, scumbags. And now you’re blaming the good guys for failing to fix your mistakes instantly. Shut up and go away.
Your average newspaper these days has added a comment section to many of its articles. That’s basically an invitation for extremists, trolls, and jackasses. A Boston Globe story about taxes, transit, or the MBTA is generally followed by several comments insisting that bloated corrupt unions are the cause of all its problems and that only a repeal of the income tax will solve anything. In the New York Times, every article about the economy will draw approximately equal numbers of comments George W. Bush and Barack Obama for the parlous state of global finance, plus at least one blaming George Soros and one advocating a return to the Gold Standard and the abolition of fractional-reserve banking systems.
But the best whackadoo comments are to be found in the dedicated financial press. For example, check out this article about oil-price fluctuations. The entirely reasonable premise of the article – that oil prices are volatile and we should plan for such volatility – leads to six hundred comments in under a day. About half are totally dismissive of a possibility of oil returning to high prices, or insisting that only speculators (George Soros again playing the role of bogeyman) caused oil to cross $100/barrel mark last year. Others of course play the opposite role and insist that ammunition, not oil, is where you want to be investing right now, and at least one commenter pops up noting that he’s stockpiling diesel, ammunition, honey, and clean underwear for the coming apocalypse.
I’ve been debating posting about this because I’ve been afraid that it will come back to haunt me in some way. But frankly, if complaining about inconveniences and speculating about other peoples business on the Internet is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.
Here’s my question: When is a company dead? When can you bury it?
I’m thinking specifically of LiveUniverse. The company was started by Brad Greenspan, who was one of the original backers behind MySpace. LiveUniverse is basically a roll-up of media websites tied to an ad network. Not a terrible business model, but the media websites themselves have to draw traffic, and they just haven’t been in the top tier.
For example, they bought the startup I used to work for, MeeVee. By total coincidence, I was departing MeeVee at the same time, so LiveUniverse only had me in its employ for one day.
They were supposed to send me some kind of paperwork about my stock options, but they never did. I don’t mind, since the odds of them being worth anything were never very good, and are worse now. That was probably the first sign of trouble. There were others, later, but I won’t bore you.
The big question mark came about a month ago, when Brad Greenspan was forced to issue a press release insisting that the company is doing fine, despite their websites all disappearing for couple days. Both major service outages and press releases saying there’s nothing wrong are big signs that something’s wrong, but website outages can happen to the best of us.
Worse signs are things like failing to send out W2s to former employees. Sure, paperwork can get lost in an acquisition, but really, your payroll provider should handle that paperwork for you. Obviously, I didn’t get my tax paperwork.
When I called to inquire about it, I found that their phone had been disconnected. That’s kind of a bad sign. Although I suppose it’s possible their website just has a typo on the “Contact Us” page.
More likely, LiveUniverse seems to be totally dead.
The only thing is, there’s been no obituary. No notice of going under. Their websites are, in fact, still loading, although the content hasn’t been updated in awhile and the TV listings on MeeVee are all broken.
TechCrunch had a post awhile back in which they asserted that death was at hand, but comments and updates disputed it. No mention in the Wikipedia page about Brad. No bankruptcy filings. Just… silence.
If a company goes under and TechCrunch isn’t there to gloat, is it still in business?
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says Obama is “more analytical” than Bush.
Pardon me for saying so, but DUH.
Secretly Ironic 